I spent a lot of my youth reading reviews. Every month, I would read every single album review in Rolling Stone and Jane, the first for what I considered respectable opinions and the latter for strange, non-sequitur narratives that were strangely precise at leading me to music I would like.
That was a different time. Back then, you had to go out and buy magazines, and you actually had time to read them cover to cover without getting distracted by push notifications and then ultimately feeling like you should read your RSS feed instead. As the noise of the Internet picked up, I found I was only reading certain types of reviews:
1. The actual number on Pitchfork reviews, since the paragraphs were too long.
2. Any review that I found horribly offensive or disagreed with enough to finish in its entirety.
3. Reviews only from famous people whose opinions I deeply respected.
4. Weirdo regular people reviews on stuff like Everybody Poops.
As my life got busier and I got more distracted, reviews went from being something useful to something I basically only consumed to get mad about.
I figured this was just me, but when I became an arts and entertainment editor, I started to realize it was a problem with the way reviews were expected to be. After editing review after review, I noticed a distinct formula that was absolutely the precedent, not necessarily a habit of one writer or another. It went something like:
Movies/Plays/Books:
-Cute quote or anecdote.
-Colorful rehash of plot and characters,.
-Critique of the actors’ performances – “___ ___ was absolutely stunning!”
-Fawning quote – “a tour de force of the human capacity for pain.”
Music:
-Rehash of who the artist is and proof that they are relevant enough to deserve a review. (I was literally told to add that proof.)
-Analysis of a couple tracks with attempts to describe sound – “glass shattering guitars.”
-Decision about whether or not this album would make the band more famous/acclaimed.
Concert reviews were another breed, a kind that was usually a hyper attempt to show how amped/not amped the crowd/band were that I found almost zero motive to read, ever.
What I realized was that the concept of reviews had become subtly shaped by PR. That formula I found so boring? Not-so-strangely similar to press releases. The increasing frequency of concert reviews? The result of a bunch of underpaid journalists figuring they at least might as well get into shows for free, writing quick reviews to appease the publicist. (Does the public demand concert reviews? Ask yourself this.)
Of course I’m not saying that reviews are pointless. I love reviews – when they’re interesting. The problem is, for every movie/book, etc. there are magazine journalists, newspaper journalists, local journalists, bloggers and just regular people writing reviews – and many of them are using the exact same format. It’s hard to decide where exactly you should go for a formulaic recount of something or another.
Publications need to ease up on the standards for reviews. Let them be explicitly subjective. Let the first person be an option. Let them be quirky and weird. It might piss off the publicist, but isn’t that what journalism is supposed to do?
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